The Roads Out Of Welfare

December 11, 1998|BY KARLA SCHUSTER Staff Writer

Danielle Jones doesn't worry about getting through the vocational program in Hollywood she starts in January. She worries about getting there.

"It's been weighing on my mind how I'm going to be at school by 7:45 a.m.," Jones, a Pembroke Park mother of one, said. "I'm thinking I'm going to have to get up at 4 a.m. to get my son to day-care and get there on time. I don't know if I'll be able to do it."

Jones, 19, is like most of those in the state's welfare-to-work program. She has no car and must rely on public transit.

A group of local social service and transportation agencies is seeking 4 million in federal grants to improve public transportation and the chances for people like Jones to get off welfare and into the workforce.

The plans include new bus routes, express buses, door-to-door van service and expanded bus hours targeted at neighborhoods in Broward and Palm Beach counties with high concentrations of poverty and welfare recipients.

The catalyst is a new federal program, called the Job Access Grant, that ties 750 million in transportation funds over the next five years to welfare reform.

Broward County's Metropolitan Planning Organization on Thursday endorsed an application for a 1.5 million federal transportation grant, and a matching grant from the state's welfare-to-work program, called Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency or WAGES, which provides education, training and other support to welfare recipients.

In Palm Beach County, officials are seeking a total of 1 million. Miami-Dade County's MPO will consider a grant application next week.

"When you talk about welfare reform, the great barriers are finding affordable, reliable child care and transportation to get to where the jobs are," said Mason Jackson, executive director of the WAGES Coalition in Broward County.

The problem is especially acute in South Florida, a region that developed around automobiles. Suburban sprawl has pushed development -- along with new jobs -- farther west, and farther away from the poorer, more densely populated areas east of Interstate 95.

And the region's bus systems have not kept up.

To participate in WAGES, you have to do things, you have to get places, to get your check," said Bob Gross, a program research and development specialist with the Broward WAGES Coalition. "You have to go to work, you have to go to training. You need to be mobile."

That means Danielle Inmon, 37-year-old mother of two, spends six hours a day on three buses to get back and forth from her home in Pompano Beach to WAGES self-sufficiency classes in Plantation.

"I really like the class," Inmon said. "It encourages you to work but it's just so hard to get there. It's hard for anyone in my neighborhood to take the bus."

In Broward County, officials want to target the neighborhoods near Inmon's in Pompano Beach, and in the unincorporated parts of the county south of Griffin Road to the Miami-Dade County line. In Palm Beach County, the plans call for express buses to connect the Belle Glade area to West Palm Beach.

Both counties are working on partnerships with private industry. In Broward, the transit improvements are geared to connect poorer areas with employment hubs including the Miramar Park of Commerce and the Coral Springs Corporate Park. and Memorial Hospital in Hollywood.

"We're doing more than just guessing this will work," said Bob Fossa, a senior planner with Broward County Transit. "We've got neighborhood leaders screaming for transit and industries telling us they can't find and keep employees."